Underspace · build 21351066 · published
Hello starchasers! It’s been a hot minute since the last patch announcement, hasn’t it. I’m sure the cats missed all of you, if they could understand such a concept.
When was the last mainline patch? September, was it? Jeez, that’s a lot of time. Obviously, our beta branch has been receiving a ton of updates, but this here mainline main branch update took a while to get anywhere, in no small part because there’s a lot of new pieces and a lot of writing that had to go into it. A lot of writing. God there was so much writing, it was probably the most miserable slog of work I’ve ever had to do; this game is honestly way too big. As big as my cat is getting, and he’s a big cat.
But, that’s over and done with now! It’s the final hours of the year, so it’s time to get all the stuff that’s been cooked up out and into the wild. There is a lot to it. It’s not our biggest update (in terms of content), but it is our biggest update in terms of download size. If you read on, the reason for this will be quite clear.
Finally, at the end of all these patch notes and such we’ve got the year end recap, so be sure to check that out as well. Let’s get into some update highlights! This is aiming to be our last large scale update before 1.0 hits: Smaller updates will still be here and there, mostly aiming for bugfixing and polish.
This is like, what, a 5gb download? 5.6gb? That’s a lot, ain’t it. You’ll notice the game’s gone up a bit in size. That’s because the entirety of the game’s internal file system has been redone to be far more data driven and modular. It’s a tradeoff, more or less, because as a benefit, you’ll see significantly less VRAM and RAM usage throughout the game (with some users reporting almost an increase by 40 FPS), but, and this is probably a bigger thing for you guys: We’ve greatly expanded mod support.
With this latest update, you can now add in new equipment, new ships, new cockpits, new items, as well as modify existing ships, items, as well as mod in new coded features, change aspects of star systems and bases, gameplay constants, and more. How do you do all this? Why, with our new Modding SDK!
Included with the latest patch of Underspace are two new important files: UnderspaceModdingSDK_v001.zip is the game’s first release of its modding editor. This is a Unity project that contains tools for creating new mods, several example prefabs of different items, as well as an included .pdf guide that contains the documentation of relevant assets and the process for creating new mods entirely. TestPlugin.zip is an included example plugin that contains the decrypted .json files that drive most of the game’s data: So station records, star system records, and ship records.
If you want even more examples to work with, I’ve also packed and uploaded the game’s various prefab files as an external download that you can import into the project to work with. Already I’ve seen beta testers making mods for this: Several are in the process of porting ships from… other games over, among other things. And I’m not done yet, because we’ve also got the Steam workshop fully integrated into the game.
That means one-click downloads for any mods, and all the nonsense that brings to the table. You can check that out, freely download new uploads, as well as upload mods of your own to the Workshop properly via the in-game, so check that out as well.
Text! Not everything has to contribute to the gameplay loop, you know. You ever play Morrowind with the Joy of Painting and Ultimate Fishing and maybe a sailing mod, where you just sit there painting sunsets, reading books, and eating whatever you caught? God that’s the life. That’s the life right there. Anyway, in the interest of fleshing out the game world but NOT adding full on new features I’ve done a huge pass on the game’s content and added a bunch of new little side-stories and folk to talk to and all that. Starting off, there’s a bunch of new in-game books to read: In-universe stories, historical texts, scientific documents, and more!
Next on the list are news stories! This is where the bulk of my time went, almost two solid months writing news story after news story after news story after… Sorry, it was pretty traumatizing, but there’s over 150 stations that have over 450 new news articles posted for players to read now.
There’s also more codex entries! Kardoz now has specific thoughts on locations, party members, certain technologies, and more. As part of an overall pass on entries like that every single chapter, bounty, codex record, archived data, and similar have all got new icons and posters.
Finally there’s a ton of new NPCs to talk to! Some are backer submitted starchasers, others are simply rumormongers or there to point you in the direction of nearby vignettes. Some flesh out the worldbuilding, and some are just there for fun. There’s over 40 new NPCs across the galaxy, and, as a further treat, there’s also a fair amount of new texture variety that’s been added to the game for all the major playable races.
Part of prepping the game for 1.0 means going over existing content and making sure it’s all nice and ship-shape, and seeing if there’s anywhere where it could be noticeably improved or fixed up.
All the quests in the game, as well the game’s main campaign, have received a pass, adding things like additional sounds, music cues, lighting redoes, new attacks for minibosses, and more. Some have new cutscenes, or generally more elements to help them flow better, more appropriate rewards, etc.
There’s lots of smaller quality of life features with this patch too. Some big ones include a total redo of train travel: Wherein you’re able to travel from a train station to any other train station you’ve discovered, provided you, you know, afford it, but prices for train stations now fluctuate based on how much cargo you’re carrying, if there’s a storm in the system, and more.
We’ve added new volume sliders for things like other ships engines (separating them out from the sound your ship makes, that is), UI sounds, etc. And then there’s a smattering of other changes: From more missions giving full mission markers to locations, a redo of piracy mechanics to make them more lucrative (and overhauling some of that comms system tech to allow for proper duels and such), new UI tabs on things like chapterhouses for finding proper archived data, and more.
And that about covers it, let’s get into the patch notes!
Engine update! Which means tons of under the hood optimizations and improved rendering. Some people have reported a nearly 40 FPS increase, which is kind of nuts.
Added news stories to every single station. Please, god, never let me have to write this much again.
Added new readable books and in-universe short stories to various areas.
The regional UI in chapterhouses now show what hazards can be found in what region.
Added region monitoring to most starchasing centers and added the ability to spawn hyperstroms at Kalgrite.
Added more volume sliders to control NPC ship ambience and UI sounds.
Added a tribute shrine to Barrely Borbly.
Added mod support for items, equipment, star systems, station data, and ships. Ur welcome.
The game now comes with a zip that contains the game’s modding tools. Please, if you’re gonna make mods, read the damn manual. I won’t be holding your hand on this, you wanna swim in the deep end? Don’t expect water wings.
Added support for mods to instantiate new objects that can execute new scripts (provided you’ve given your plugin a .dll file to do so).
All storm hazards have proper icons for their scanned data.
All bounty posters now have proper unique icons for the posters.
All legendary ships now have proper scanned item data and display the matching shorthand name in their entry.
Starchasing chapters now have proper logos.
Added more texture variety to NPCs on stations.
All dialogue on stations now has proper animations and emotions when going through shit. You know how it is.
Added more animations for several talking cutscenes during quests.
Added codex records for party members, regions, and some additional technology.
Added proper icons for all codex records.
Added a TON (over 40+) new characters and people to talk to on stations. Some give rumors and point you towards bases and points of interest, some flesh out the lore, some are back-created starchasing chapter representatives. There’s a lot of folk here.
Added Steam Workshop support.
Added the ability to upload and tag mods to the Steam Workshop.
Added missing description to all regions.
Added new sound effects to the data center and added some sub-categories to better sort and keep track of things you’ve scanned.
Courier missions now route you to the courier station in question. Because using the search bar is too hard, apparently.
Rampage missions will now route you to the nearest location that that enemy type could be found, because god forbid you spend five seconds thinking about how to complete a mission instead of blindly following the all knowing orange marker. Praise be to the all knowing orange marker.
Added more bits to Gilliam’s Geysers.
Cleaned up stations of various duplicate details, helping with rendering issues (particularly in bars).
Jumpgates, lanelines, and jumpholes will no longer be targeted by the target-closest-enemy-key.
Train travel has been overhauled: You can fast travel to any train station you’ve discovered, but prices fluctuate on factors such as storms, if you’re carrying cargo, if they’re in the same region, etc. The functionality for the “show train route” button has been changed to simply display systems with train stations now.
Us Transports and Us transport turrets have been significantly buffed. Don’t mess with the Us.
Rebalanced the price of wrecked items so that they’d have more value if you chose not to repair them.
Refactored a huge amount of the game’s internal file structure, which means better performance (though you may notice some longer loading times) and less memory usage in exchange for a larger file size for the game overall.
Rebalanced some early game storm hazards to be more forgiving.
Sun volumetrics are now suppressed if the sun is not visible when outside of a nebula.
Shrank the size of wreck items on the navmap for better visibility.
Redid graphics for ambient star dust.
The storage UI now displays the count of wreckage items.
Changed closing animations for the comm window.
Rewrote some later tutorials to be simplified.
Three Scrappers and a Cube now has quest markers.
Scanned data is now sorted alphabetically.
Redid garage graphics slightly.
The in-game manual has been reworked to pull from game tutorials.
Decreased the amount of time before a volatile ace pilot explodes and increased the visual size of its effects.
Expanded some jumphole clearings in fields so that players wouldn’t spawn inside asteroids.
Trying to pirate a ship you’ve just pirated will cause that ship to turn hostile.
Increased the chance of pirating repair items off ships and made payouts for piracy slightly more random, as well as made both affected by the piracy skill.
NPCs will give proper reasons for denying a duel now.
Reach Station now comes with a free player home.
Added various small improvements to side quests: Such as sound cues, better failure-catch states, more graphical effects, improved miniboss encounters, and more.
Went back over parts of the campaign to refresh them, small graphical improvements, music cues, etc.
Added new cutscene elements to the main campaign.
Fixed some softlocks during the campaign if cutscenes were interrupted.
Fixed some mislabeled NPCs on stations.
Fixed color icons not working when contextual color UIs were turned off.
Fixed issue where big kill solars were dying too early.
Fixed various typos.
Fixed issue where NPCs would be wearing clothes they weren’t meant to be wearing.
Fixed some mislabeled bits in Vauldwin police elite missions.
Fixed issue where the Overmind could SEE YOU everywhere, instead of just Macrovari space.
Fixed storms appearing during missions where they should not appear.
Fixed some texture errors when blowing up battleships.
Fixed mislabeled customization terminals.
Fixed some weird particle rendering errors from the port.
Fixed issue where highcruisers wouldn’t stop moving in combat and wouldn’t leave behind a sweet corpse with tons of epic loot.
Fixed some cancellation issues with mission waypoints.
Fixed issue where the escape key wouldn’t close keycode UIs.
Fixed some floating weird purple things on stations.
Fixed some floating doormarkers.
Fixed some clipping issues during Hard Business.
Fixed some jumphole spawning issues for campaign mission 11.
Fixed some animation errors in quest cutscenes.
Fixed broken fonts for alien dialogue.
Fixed some misplaced leaving nodes on stations.
Fixed several weapon cycling group issues.
Fixed issue where large ships following you could bump into you.
Fixed text issue on the cockpits for Sons fighters.
Fixed some importation errors on several skyboxes.
Fixed character save buttons being able to be reclicked.
Fixed issue where an open frienddrive couldn’t be closed by the tab wheel.
Fixed issue where planetary rings outside of nebulas would be visible within the nebula.
Fixed some rendering issues with laneline arrows.
Fixed issue where various places during the main campaign could be walked out of or wouldn’t reset properly.
Fixed small waypoint errors when traveling lanelines.
Fixed issue where reloading a save when in cockpit mode could cause brief visual weirdness.
Fixed issue where you couldn’t create waypoint to stations while on stations.
Fixed softlock during campaign mission 5 where you could prematurely leave the Axle.
Fixed issue where pirates would continue to demand cargo even when dead.
Fixed reloading issues related to assassination missions.
Fixed some small rendering issues.
Fixed pathing issues during duplicate missions.
Fixed some phantom settings that were appearing.
Fixed issue where out of system waypoints would clear when docking on a station.
Fixed issue with the Us Corpse Collection mission.
Fixed issue where health wasn’t saving in quicksaves and autosaves.
Fixed camera issues with junktech ship cockpits.
Fixed some minor issues with on-station optimization tech (you wouldn’t notice it, but I did).
Fixed issue where reloading a save when in a laneline would cause laneline sounds to persist.
Fixed issue where some records in the records tab wouldn’t display.
Fixed issue where damage calculations for hazards like radiation were completely wrong.
Fixed issue where some items that had no ammunition were meant to have ammunition.
Fixed issue where some icons would persist in a save reload.
Fixed issue where the Ship Carver could be crafted before the relevant quest was completed.
Fixed issue where cycling weapon groups would deactivate heavy weapons and similar equipment types.
Fixed issue where jump-in sounds when traveling would occur too early.
Fixed issue where shields with no shield type wouldn’t take damage.
Fixed issue where several legendary effects weren’t working properly.
Fixed issue where large ships could kill themselves with their own missiles. Now, under normal circumstances large ships don’t use missiles, but. You know. Just in case.
Fixed issue where the key press time setting wasn’t working.
Fixed some overlapping UI elements in the information section of the starchasing UI.
Fixed some small issues with Priest Killer missions.
Fixed issue where readouts were no longer occurring on stations.
Fixed issue where Veilers had no emotions.
Fixed issue where leaving dialogue early would cause animation errors.
Fixed small cutscene issue where the cutscene wouldn’t set skybox settings properly.
Fixed saves not loading when quitting to the main menu due to bad resource allocation.
Fixed some visual issues on Planet Landings during the campaign.
Fixed issue where you could accidentally unbind the pause button.
Fixed some smaller damage fuse related issues.
Whew, that’s a lot of notes. We’re not done yet though. You’ve done real good, getting this far, so have some more cats. That’s why you come to these, isn’t it? The cats? Right.
There you go, now let’s get into where things have been and where we’re going.
2025 was another big year for Underspace. I’m going to guess that’s going to happen a lot in a game like this; big years and all that. Unfortunately, we missed our original 1.0 release date window by a pretty wide margin, in no small part due to the fact that it’s still just me working on the game, and killing myself to get the game out in time is, fortunately, no longer an option. Still, at the same time we’ve gotten out two big milestone updates this year, which brought the game that much closer to release.
This milestone update was, in fact, so dang huge it had to be split into two parts. The first bit, Intergalactic Architecture, saw the implementation of many of the game’s planets and explorable first person areas, including the game’s capital city the Axle, as well as many other in-game homeworlds. It also added new flyable ships, new quests, new dialogue, and more.
Our second major update, the Color Out Of Space, brought in a huge amount of player customization options. In addition to letting the player put in new custom content, we added tons of new character customization pieces, new planets to land on explore, and, most significantly, the ability to buy and decorate player houses, as well as do the same to any ship cockpit (and ship cockpits were properly implemented too, of course). There were also a smattering of other things like an in-game journal, map notes, and a detailing pass.
Finally, I also managed to squeeze a whole engine update into the game, which massively increased framerates on a lot of computers, and opened up a whole new world of features that were, previously, more or less impossible due to the engine version we were stuck on. No more of that, anymore.
There’s now one final milestone update left before our 1.0 release: The Soulchaser Endeavor.
Effectively there’s only a few things left in that update before 1.0 is ready to be tested:
Most of these tasks are comparatively small (though voice acting will take some time to get in, I’m in the process of wrangling actors and implementing that), but multiplayer, as always, stands as the big thing. Work on that stalled a bit following the engine update, as it required our background netcode (like the actual connect-disconnect-player-spawning stuff, not the top level code that linked this to gameplay mechanics, which remained the same) to be completely redone following our previous netcode becoming deprecated to the point of unusability. Luckily I was able to hash out some things with the multiplayer devs at Rockstar and get some good advice and takeaways from all that, so work on that is progressing.
The content for it is implemented (though needs a pass and polish), but there’s a huge amount of additional concessions and considerations that have to be worked with now: Not the least of which is allowing servers to properly implement all that mod stuff and make sure nothing explodes. I’m aiming to have more on multiplayer in the coming months, with the beta branch being the primary source of updates there before 1.0’s big launch.
Otherwise, I’ll also be aiming to add additional mod support: .ini importation, adding new things to stations and star systems, adding new star systems and stations entirely, various smaller additions there to better optimize things in memory, etc.
And that’s all! I need to take a long bath and a long break, but I’ll be back late next month with more beta branch updates and other stuff. As always, you can check out our Discord for more moment-to-moment news. I’ll leave you with a final cat-collage to close out the new year. Here’s to a particularly spacey 2026!